BritishJournalof Psychiatry(1992),160,467—472 Dermatoglyphic Evidence of Fluctuating Asymmetry in Schizophrenia

Fluctuatingasymmetry provides a measure of an organism's capacity to buffer adverse factors that coulddisturbitsdevelopment.It isestimatedfromthe differencesbetweentheoretically identicalrightand left-sidedstructures. Dermatoglyphicfluctuating asymmetryhas been recently used to investigate developmental disorders. Fingerprintsand palm prints of schizophrenic patients, which had been the subjects of an earlier report of conventional dermatoglyphic trait frequencies, were reanalysed to determine their level of fluctuating asymmetry. A review of the diagnostic protocols and clinicalrecords used inthe originalstudy indicated that most of the 482 subjects would have met DSM-lll-R criteria for schizophrenia. The schizophrenic sample had significantly higher levels of fluctuating asymmetry on four dermatoglyphic traits, the finger-ridge counts, fingerprint patterns, the palmer atd angles and palmer a-b ridge counts, than controls. This finding supports the results of two earlier studies, and its relevance to the roles of genetics, foetal insults, and developmental anomalies of the brain in the aetiology of schizophrenia is discussed.